Word: rituals
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...nations. But officials never even debate the merits and drawbacks of nationalization; it's outside the narrow range of the politically possible. One type of government enterprise with historical precedent is the crash program to cope with a crisis or meet a technological challenge. "Manhattan project" and "moonshot" are ritual utterances for politicians trying to summon the national will...
When the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court meet to discuss and vote on cases on Friday mornings, they begin with 'he simple ritual of shaking hands. Then they sit down to decide on some of the nation's most sensitive, sometimes most divisive issues. No reporter, no lobbyist, no aide, not even a messenger is allowed in the paneled conference room. The Justices are left alone to argue the law, their principles, their consciences. Theirs is not an abstract debate: comfortably hazy concepts like ''liberty'' and ''equality'' must...
...American public event that possessed, even before he wrote about it, a certain Mailerian quality: the execution, early in 1977, of Gary Gilmore, 36, a Utah murderer who refused to appeal his conviction and death sentence and demanded that the state kill him. Utah obliged, but only after a ritual that turned Gilmore into a grotesque celebrity. Shortly before the prisoner was seated in front of a dirty mattress to face the firing squad, ABC-TV's Geraldo Rivera was screaming into his mike to his producers at Good Morning, America in New York: "Kill the Rona segment...
...Agnes, the elderly "hand-hewn" Rolls-Royce pickup truck - to his old pal and counselor, Meyer, a famed economist who inhabits the next-door houseboat, John Maynard Keynes. The salvager plucks his life savings of $9,300 from a cache and becomes Tom McGraw, a retired fisherman. Following a ritual clue Gretel had given him a few days before dying, he heads for northern California, in search of a fictitious missing daughter who has supposedly disappeared in the moil of a fanatical religious commune. Its remaining inhabitants, when he finds them, are no Moonies. Armed to the bicuspids...
...operagoers moved through the gala ritual of the Metropolitan's opening night last week, they were met with an unfamiliar sight. Television lights glared down on the huge Chagall murals and curving marble staircases. Cameras panned the red-carpeted lobby. On the Grand Tier balcony, presumably sophisticated first-nighters pressed around to gawk at Met Tour Director Francis Robinson's TelePrompTer as he beamed at interviewees. The occasion was a live broadcast to public television's 282 U.S. stations, as well as to Canada and Mexico. "It's like a political convention," complained one elegant buff...